New iMac gets the iFixit teardown treatment

It was only a matter of time before the chaps at iFixit got their screwdrivers in hand in order to pull off another teardown of a just-released gadget - this time it's the turn of the new Apple iMac complete with Thunderbolt and Sandy Bridge technology.

It was the 21.5-incher that came under the scrutiny of the team, and as this wasn't the first time that an iMac model had been given the treatment the use of suction cups to remove the magnetically-held display glass from the body had already been established.

One of the main points of interest seemed to be that the Thunderbolt IC that was found was not exactly the same as the recent MacBook Pro 15-inch, with an Intel L102IA84 EFL Thunderbolt port IC in place.

It was also found that the machine was powered by a quad-core 2.5 GHz Core i5-2800S CPU with 6MB of Intel Smart Cache and "the main chips on the GPU board include the AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU, as well as four Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2L 1 Gb GDDR SDRAM chips (totaling a cumulative 512 MB)".

The chaps also thought a lot of the wireless communication as the iMac 21.5 included an Atheros AR9388-AL1A 802.11n wireless LAN chip in the Wi-Fi card.

And the repairability score? A very decent 7/10, with most of the task "accomplished using a T10 Torx screwdriver and suction cups."